Working-class Young People Research Articles

Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

Civilising the Natives? Liberal Studies in Further Education Revisited

ABSTRACTThis paper uses Basil Bernstein’s work on pedagogic discourses to examine a largely neglected facet of the history of vocational education – the liberal studies movement in English further education colleges. Initially, the paper discusses some of the competing conceptions of education, work and society which underpinned the rise and fall of the liberal studies movement – if indeed it can be described as such. The paper then draws on data from interviews with former liberal and general studies lecturers to focus on the ways in which different variants of liberal studies were, over time, implicated in inculcating certain forms of knowledge in vocational learners. Whilst it is acknowledged that liberal and general studies always represented contested territory and that it was highly variable both in terms of content and quality, the paper argues that, at least under certain circumstances, liberal studies provided young working-class people with the opportunity to locate their experiences of vocational learning within a critical framework that is largely absent from further education today. This, it is argued, can be conceptualised as an engagement with what Bernstein described as ‘powerful knowledge’.

Hegemony through Responsibilisation: Getting Working-Class Students into Higher Education in the United Kingdom

This article examines the role of the New Labour government's agenda for widening participation in higher education as a form of a responsibilising discourse of working-class young people. Under the New Labour administrations of 1997–2010, a concerted attempt was made to attract working-class students into higher education through promotional initiatives such as the Aimhigher programme. Drawing from Raymond Williams' discussion of hegemony and also from Nikolas Rose's concept of the ‘enterprising self’, this article examines three explanatory/promotional documents from the Aimhigher programme, aimed at working-class young people and their parents. The documents are analysed as materialisations of a powerfully hegemonic discourse of ‘responsibilisation’ towards participation in higher education. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the widening access agenda has shifted since the Conservative-led coalition government came to power in 2010.

Managing everyday life: the conceptualisation and value of cultural capital in navigating everyday life for working-class youth

This article draws upon Bourdieu's concept of ‘cultural capital’ to examine how working-class young people negotiate and navigate everyday life in their neighbourhoods. Young people's relationship with cultural capital has traditionally been conceptualised by its value in the formal institutional setting (i.e. schools); being ‘owned’ and ‘used’ by parents or professional workers such as teachers to advantage (or disadvantage) certain groups; or by being passed down to young people through intergenerational linkages. Limited recognition has been given to the embodied and objectified nature of cultural capital in the lives of the young themselves or how it may operate in different informal settings and social interactions to structure and situate their individual agency. This article centralises the voices of a group of young people living in British working-class neighbourhoods to show how certain cultural illiteracies and cultural assets help them manage everyday life. Life in such areas is both ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’ and requires them to draw upon forms of cultural capital recognised amongst their peers to help them construct ‘safe’ and ‘successful’ routes through working-class transitions.

Undergraduates’ memories of school-based work experience and the role of social class in placement choices in the UK

This paper reports findings from a study of 49 young first-year UK undergraduates who had undergone one or two weeks of work experience at school between the ages of 14 and 16. Previous studies focusing on the whole school cohort suggested that the nature of work experience placements was strongly predicted by class. In particular, middle class families were seen as being able to secure higher-quality placements than working class families through their higher levels of social capital. This study of young people in the large minority subset subsequently progressing to higher education also found evidence of stereotypical placement choices. However, this was situated in low-quality placements that were irrelevant to the participants’ eventual career path. One notable finding was that a significant proportion of working class students had exercised considerable personal agency to secure high-quality placements. This could challenge structuralist interpretations of young people’s decision-making, although the possibility of a retrospective construction of an explanatory narrative is noted. This paper concludes that more effort is needed to push academically-able working class young people towards placements that will increase motivation and widen horizons and that government needs to be clearer about its policy aims in this area.

Crossing the line? White young people and community cohesion

The emergence of community cohesion as a British policy priority has represented a discursive shift in approaches to race relations, the emphasis on ethnic diversity downplayed in favour of commonality, shared values and the promotion of national identity. Central to community cohesion has been a focus on ‘contact’ as a way of overcoming ‘parallel lives’, and the need for communities to take responsibility within processes of contact and dialogue. The political focus, echoing past assimilationist discourses, has been on an alleged lack of integration on the part of Muslims; by contrast little attention is paid to how white working class young people view the contact central to cohesion strategies. This paper draws on case study evidence from Oldham and Rochdale, Greater Manchester to interpret the limited support the young white respondents have for cross-ethnic contact, and the relevance of class experience to these views.

Post-crisis, post-Ford and post-gender? Youth identities in an era of austerity

In this review I explore the connections between debates about the transformation of work in a service-dominated economy and those about classed and gendered identities. I suggest they might usefully be connected in analyses of disadvantage and exclusion among working-class young people. Youth involvement in protest and unrest in English cities, as well as rising rates of unemployment, raise questions about the connections between labour market exclusion and young men's and women's construction and performance of acceptable versions of gendered identities. Performative identities are crucial in gaining employment, especially in the forms of low-waged interactive employment open to young people with few skills or little educational capital.

Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty

Past research in both the transitions to adulthood literature and cultural sociology more broadly suggests that the working class relies on traditional cultural models in their construction of identity. In the contemporary post-industrial world, however, traditional life pathways are now much less available to working-class men and women. I draw on 93 interviews with black and white working-class young people in their 20s to 30s and ask, in an era of increasing uncertainty, where traditional markers of adulthood have become tenuous, what kinds of cultural models do working-class young people employ to validate their adult identities? In contrast to previous studies of working-class identity, I found that respondents embraced a model of therapeutic selfhood—that is, an inwardly directed self preoccupied with its own psychic development. I demonstrate that the therapeutic narrative allows working-class men and women to redefine competent adulthood in terms of overcoming a painful family past. Respondents required a witness to validate their performances of adulthood, however, and the inability to find one left many lost in transition.

A Practice of Concrete Utopia? Informal Youth Support and the Possibility of ‘Redemptive Remembering’ in a UK Coal-Mining Area

At a moment when individualised and de-historicised notions of ‘aspiration’, ‘resilience’ and ‘wellbeing’ are proliferating in policy discourse shaping informal youth support practice, this article argues, instead, for a critically historical focus. In reviewing material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of young people in contact with youth support teams in a former coal-mining community in Derbyshire, UK, the case is made for understanding how young working-class people's experience of education is situated within historical geographies of collectively transmitted affect. In the particular coal-mining locality considered, these classed spatialities of feeling have been shaped through traditions of political, trade union and community resistance and mutual aid established over a 200-year period and culminating in the locally bitterly divided national miners' strike of 1984–85. Beginning from an ethnographic field note, the article outlines how such insubordinate community histories – particularly those imagining a radical reconstitution of society – can be silenced when a collective psycho-social space once redolent with hope becomes a space of ruin as a result of politically orchestrated de-industrialisation. Noticing how this compounds young people's experience of marginalisation and leaves them at once adrift from the ‘illegitimate’ histories that are their legitimate ‘heritage’, and at the same time subject to the traumatic affective legacy of those same histories, a critical counter-practice in informal youth support is proposed. Drawing on Blochian readings of Freire, the article calls for a form of intergenerational ‘redemptive remembering’ – a practice of ‘concrete utopia’ – capable of recovering ‘unspeakable’ community histories for a collective remaking of resilience and aspiration beyond the received confines of the neoliberal imaginary.

Emotional geographies of young people's aspirations for adult life

For the last decade, the aspirations of working class young people have been a significant policy concern in the UK, with a range of interventions being implemented to work on and ‘raise’ them (particularly through initiatives to widen participation in higher education). This paper considers the emotional geographies of young people's aspirations. Interventions to ‘raise’ young people's aspirations act on an emotional/affective level (creating ‘wow’ moments that affect their perceptions of what is possible) but seldom engage holistically with the full range of emotions that young people experience in relation to their imagined adult lives. The prioritisation of progression to higher education (and, by extension, professional careers) as the most acceptable ‘aspirations’ to have overlooks the wide range of other ambitions young people have for their adult lives (and how these often rest upon the desire for emotional security and happiness). This disconnection between working class young people's aspirations and those promoted by policy interventions undermines efforts to inspire more working class teenagers to progress to HE and creates greater emotional risk for those that do so.

‘I don’t want to go to a crummy little university’: social class, higher education choice and the paradox of widening participation

Whilst there has been growing attention paid to the imbalance of Higher Education (HE) applications according to social class, insufficient attention has been paid to the successful minority of working-class young people who do secure places in some of the UK’s leading HE institutions. In particular, the influence and nature of pre-university interventions on such students’ choice of institution has been under-explored. Data from an ESRC-funded PhD study of 16 young people who participated in a Sutton Trust Summer School are used to illustrate how the effects of a school-based institutional habitus and directed intervention programmes can be instrumental in guiding student choices and decisions relating to participation in Higher Education.

Constructions of the working-class ‘Other’ among urban, white, middle-class youth: ‘chavs’, subculture and the valuing of education

In the context of a ‘death’ of class in popular and policy discourse, this paper argues that social class is still a major force at work in young people's lives, particularly in the context of schooling. We argue that young people's subcultural groups are classed, in the way in which they are constructed in discourse. Drawing on a data set of 68 interviews with white, middle-class young people in three different cities in England, we argue that class can be seen and felt in young people's constructions of the ‘chav’, where white, working-class young people's ways of being and doing in the context of schooling, stand in stark contrast to the normative middle-class subject, and become pathologized.

In a Different Place: Working-class Girls and Higher Education

This article examines the effects of material inequality and gender expectations in structuring working-class girls' aspirations about higher education (HE). Through reference to recent ethnographic work in an inner-London secondary school two key arguments are made about how the combined effects of gender and class limit the social mobility HE is expected to provide. First, it is argued that family ties generate gender-specific obligations for working-class women, which have strong social consequences in terms of the take-up of HE places and labour market participation. This is particularly important since the commitment of working-class girls to home and family has been neglected in many theories of gender and social mobility. Second, it is argued that despite the recent political energy devoted to espousing a democratic HE system, the sense of entitlement to HE entry is, for young working-class people, undermined by a diminishing sense of the right to access middle-class spaces and institutions.

Bitter Memories and Burst Soap Bubbles: Irony, Parody, and Satire in the Oral-Literary Tradition of Finnish Working-Class Youth at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

This article discusses irony, parody, and satire in the oral-literary tradition of Finnish working-class youth during the first decades of the twentieth century. The most important research material is Valistaja (The Enlightener, 1914–1925), a handwritten newspaper produced by young working-class people in the industrial town of Karkkila in southern Finland. This research material provides examples of different kinds of parody: ideological parody is directed against both political opponents and the texts representing their ideology; generic parody involves playing with linguistic norms and generic conventions. Parody and satire provided means for exposing the cruelty and cowardice of the anti-Bolshevik Whites, the hypocrisy of the Church, and the conservatism of the older generation of workers. The ironic expressions reflect the experiences and tensions among groups of young people in Karkkila.

`University's not for Me — I'm a Nike Person': Urban, Working-Class Young People's Negotiations of `Style', Identity and Educational Engagement

This ar ticle explores how urban working-class young people's performances of embodied identities — as enacted through practices of `taste' and style — are played out within the educational field.The ar ticle considers how such practices may contribute to shaping young people's post-16 `choices' and their views of higher education as `not for me'. Drawing on data from longitudinal tracking inter views with 53 individual young people and discussion groups with a fur ther 36 pupils, the article discusses the double-bind experienced by these young people as a result of their performances of style. It is argued that whilst the young people seek to generate wor th and value through their investments in style, these practices may also play into oppressive social relations and contribute to fixing the young people within marginalized and disadvantaged social positions.

Breadwinners and Dependants: Working-Class Young People in England, 1918–1955

The prevailing image of twentieth-century English “youth” is as a triumphal signifier of affluent leisure consumption. By contrast, this article demonstrates the importance of young working-class people's economic role as wage-earners in the mid-twentieth century. This shaped their treatment by the family and the state and the life histories of the adults they became. Juveniles were crucial breadwinners in interwar working-class households. However, the consequences of high unemployment among adult males helped redefine youth as a period of state protection and leisure in the post-1945 decades. Nevertheless, personal affluence remained limited, and young people's economic responsibilities high, until at least the mid-1950s. The history of twentieth-century youth is best understood as one in which young working-class people's fortunes were closely linked to their family's circumstances and their importance as a supply of cheap labour. Social class thus formed, and was formed by, the experience and memory of being young.

Alternative sport programmes and social inclusion in Norway

This article examines the ‘alternative’ sport and physical activities provided by the Sports City Programme (SCP) in Norway, which are designed to attract more young people (especially inactive young people) to take part in physical activities. In particular, it examines whether these ‘alternative’ sports have been more successful than conventional sports in breaking down class and gender-based barriers to participation. The data indicate that the SCP has proved more attractive to working class young people than conventional sport and there is also some evidence that the SCP has had some success in breaking down gender barriers, especially among working class girls. However, one aspect of the SCP - the open sport hall - has generated a pattern of male dominance and female exclusion which is even more unequal than that which characterizes conventional sport. Within the open sport hall, young people are left largely to organize their own activities and it is argued that the relative absence of adult control in the open sport hall has facilitated the development of a distinctively masculine culture which is dominated by the older, stronger males and which marginalizes young females.

Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire Elizabeth Gargano (bio) Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire. By Troy Boone . New York: Routledge, 2005. In 1890, the same year that Henry Morton Stanley's best-selling memoir In Darkest Africa thrilled the English reading public, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, published his own account of a metaphorical journey of exploration, In Darkest England, And the Way Out. Paraphrasing Stanley's title, Booth drew the same parallels that so many English writers—from reformers like Henry Mayhew to popular novelists like Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins—found persuasive: the urban slums of industrialized England (what Mayhew called the "undiscovered country of the poor") were as foreign, and possibly as frightening, to the middle-class English observer as the exoticized terrain of colonial Africa. Depicting the lives of the poor, particularly children, in lurid terms, Booth lamented the case of a prostitute's daughter "suckled on [End Page 99] gin," as well as the "thousands" of boys "who may be said to have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mothers' milk." As he strove to help poor children, Booth clearly found much amiss with impoverished parents and their child-raising practices. While Booth saw a cure for urban poverty in the charitable activities, moral uplift, and militaristic regimentation of the Salvation Army, Henry Mayhew, the author of the voluminous London Labour and the London Poor, pursued a less directive but equally problematic agenda, hoping to shed light on London's impoverished citizens through an exhaustive catalogue of their activities, habits, and private lives. Mayhew's massive compendium included separate sections on "The Street Sellers of Ham Sandwiches" and "Cats' and Dogs'-Meat Dealers," on "Mud-Larks" (who scavenged articles from the muddy banks of the Thames) and "Crossing-Sweepers," as well as on such popular entertainers as "The Street Conjurer" and "The Penny-Gaff Clown." In recent decades, literary scholars have mined the rich, provocative, and often troubling literature of Victorian social analysis and reform, uncovering striking parallels between the imperial impulse at home and abroad. Over a decade ago, Anne McClintock's influential Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest documented the extent to which such self-styled urban explorers as Mayhew and Arthur Munby chose to see the urban poor as uncivilized "primitives," metaphorical colonial subjects at the heart of industrialized England. Drawing on the critical tradition epitomized by McClintock's work, Troy Boone's Youth of Darkest England focuses more specifically on efforts to indoctrinate working-class children and adolescents in middle-class values while drawing them into the British imperial project. Thus, it makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian and Edwardian children's culture. Deftly analyzing the rhetoric employed by Mayhew, Booth, and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, Boone illuminates the paradoxical dynamic by which they appeared to offer working-class youth a valued place in imperial England while also maintaining subtle class distinctions. Such reformers hoped that a sense of empire would instill pride and patriotism in the working classes, muffling the growing class consciousness that had fueled the Chartist and working men's movements. Peripheralized as they might feel within the context of British society, working-class young people could supposedly imagine themselves to be at the heart of a fur-flung constellation of colonies that paid homage to England. As Boone demonstrates, however, the proponents of class unification through a celebration of empire purveyed mixed messages that revealed their own profound ambivalence. If their often hortatory writings appeared to elide class differences in the service of empire, they also employed rhetorical tropes that undermined solidarity and equality between classes. Since much of Boone's book focuses on unpacking the rhetoric of empire, he is especially attentive to two analogies that permeate the diverse literature [End Page 100] of reform. As he argues, such "social imperialist texts" (8) tend to portray the poor as children or adolescents not yet capable of governing or taking full responsibility for themselves; in addition, they repeatedly represent "the middle classes...

Locality and gendered capital of working-class youth

This article is based on a study of social and spatial transitions of about 20-year-old young people in four different sites in Finland. The data consist of 61 interviews, and in this article four case studies are presented. I analyse young people’s social class and family background, as well as the cultural and social capitals (Bourdieu, 1986), which I assume to be mediated through gender and locality (Skeggs, 1998). Also I will inspect Coleman’s argument (1988) that social capital and cultural (i.e. human) capital are strongly connected with each other. The data agree with many previous studies and indicate that working-class young people tend to choose similar types of occupation as their parents, many are likely to stay in the local community in future, and social capital is very important while achieving cultural capital and education. However, there are great differences in the ways working-class youth make use of their cultural and social capitals, so we must analyse carefully the emotional, social, local and material conditions of young women and men in order to understand their gendered life histories and educational choices.

Understanding working-class 'drop-out' from higher education through a sociocultural lens: Cultural narratives and local contexts

The 'drop-out' of working-class students from universities has been identified as one of the most pressing issues for the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom. This article draws on the initial findings of a major research project that explores the meanings and implications of such withdrawal from HE amongst young working-class people. The article argues that drop-out should be seen not just as an educational problem, but also as a manifestation of sociocultural change. To understand drop-out we need to look beyond student support needs or institutional barriers to cultural narratives and local contexts. This enables us to use a sociological frame to understand the educational question, and employ the educational data to contribute to sociological debates on class. The article analyses 'drop-out' as a self-fulfilling cultural narrative that is increasingly connoted as working class, as well as being a consequence of the material exigencies of working-class circumstances. It illustrates how class identity mutates yet stays the same, with the working class still positioned in terms of 'lack'. Although the possibility of university study has become a part of working-class identity, the expectation that this experience may be 'flawed' or 'spoilt' has also become engrained. The article analyses drop-out as two sides of one coin: as both significantly influenced by local culture and as having a perceived impact upon that culture, with different effects in different locales.